Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(121)

It was not a happy marriage, but at least it was a long one; she moved out of his house and into a house he paid for in Collierville, Tennessee, and they would live that way indefinitely, separated but still legally wed, seeing each other now and then. It would seem an odd arrangement, but Jerry Lee did not want to live with her and he did not want the or-deal of a divorce, and there was no one then he wanted to marry in her place. So he let it limp along for eight years. The marriage was mostly invisible, coming to light only in court records when she filed for nonsupport for herself and the child; most people had assumed the union had just dissolved years ago, and the ones who knew better accused him of abandonment. When the marriage did end, it would not be in a courtroom but in another tragedy.

In the meantime, he had unrenounced rock and roll and all that it implied, including its enticements. Now, instead of recording any more new country songs, he went back in time to a song that seemed to have little or no room in its history for a remake—and found a hit in that, too, in fact his biggest hit in years. The song was “Chantilly Lace,” a signature song for the Big Bopper, recorded on the Mercury label in ’58, a novelty song that rode the Top Forty at the time, and deposited the punch line “Oh, baby, you know what I like!” in the public consciousness for good. The original version was so recognizable and such a novelty that Jerry Lee wasn’t sure there was room on the airwaves for a new version. He had to be talked into it by someone he trusted.

Jud Phillips had rejoined Jerry Lee’s life as a kind of ad hoc adviser, because he was one of the few people on earth who could hang with Jerry Lee on an all-nighter or three-day binge. Jud had not renounced anything, and he had some of his best ideas when he was flat on the carpet. “Jud was the man that was callin’ the shots on those records,” recalls Jerry Lee. One day, Jerry Lee says, they were sitting around, trying to find a hit, “and he was so drunk that he couldn’t stand up. He’s just layin’ there on the floor. And he said, ‘It’s time to do ‘Chantilly Lace.’”

Jerry Lee was skeptical, he says, but “I never called Jud wrong.”

“Jud,” he said, “I don’t know the song. I don’t even know the words to it.”

But he already knew what Jud would say. “Then just fake it.”

Jerry Kennedy remembers what followed as a wild session, with Jerry Lee pounding through chorus after chorus. What Jerry Lee remembers is what it took to get started.

“I had never played it before,” he recalls. He knew he’d have to do something different to it: “I took the song, and put my style to it. And rewrote it word for word,” putting his own sly spin on the ball:

Helllllooooo, you good-lookin’ thing, you

Yeah—huh? This is the Killer speaking . . .



But the real problem wasn’t what he would do with the song—it was making sure a huge room full of studio musicians, including a full complement of strings, wouldn’t kill the spontaneity with sweetness. “I went in and told Jerry Kennedy, I said, ‘You turn on the red light, like we’re not recording.’” Like Sam Phillips, he believed that sometimes the best performances came when everyone was relaxed. “But we were recording. I told him to just leave it, leave the tape running, and capture that first take. I said, ‘Don’t worry about the band hittin’ a bad note or anything, because they know the song.’ And we nailed it. One take.”

Afterward, the conductor of the string section came over to Jerry Lee, happy with the rehearsal.

“I think we can do it again. We got it.”

“You just cut the record,” said Jerry Lee.

“Aw, no, it couldn’t be!”

“Oh, yeah it is,” Jerry Lee said. “That’s a hit.”

He was right. “Chantilly Lace” spent three weeks at number one on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart; it was a Top 50 pop hit in the States and a Top 40 hit in the United Kingdom. For many loyal fans, the record captured everything they loved most about him. When he sang the old rock and roll, it reminded them of a time when there would have been no such music without that little bit of hillbilly in it; and so it reminded them of being young. But where the jolly, unthreatening Bopper had sounded only mildly lecherous singing about that “ponytail, hangin’ down,” Jerry Lee breathed a different kind of attitude into the song.

Do I like what?

I sure do like it, baby. . . .



“Chantilly Lace” was a highlight of a new album, The Killer Rocks On, along with his cover of a Kristofferson song that Janis Joplin had made famous not long before, “Me and Bobby McGee.” With its rueful, retrospective quality, “Bobby McGee” fit him perfectly, and from then on, people would call for it at his live shows. “That’s a song,” he says now.

Jerry Lee’s friendship with Kristofferson was a kind of mutual admiration society. Jerry Lee had always responded to strength and confidence in real men, and in Kristofferson he saw all of that. This was a man who had finished the army’s ranger school, flown helicopters, and boxed at Oxford, and yet who still wrote gentle songs like “For the Good Times.” More than that, he seemed to not give one damn what the music establishment—or anyone, for that matter—thought of him. And like Jerry Lee, he had made it work for him. A Rhodes Scholar, he would always hold to the teachings of William Blake, who believed that if a man had a God-given talent, then he should use it, or reap sorrow and despair. Jerry Lee just knew the man wrote songs—words—that stuck in people’s hearts like fishhooks.